Climate Change

Written By JD Bauman

Full report

By Shilpita Mathews and Dominic Roser

Report depth:

Intermediate

Summary

Why focus on this problem?

The IPCC projects that the impacts of climate change, or more specifically, going from 1.5 degrees of global warming to 2 degrees could have catastrophic effects such as:

  • 1.7 billion more people experience severe heatwaves at least once every five years

  • up to several hundred million more people become exposed to climate-related risks and poverty

  • Passing critical biodiversity tipping points, such as a 99% decline in the world’s coral reefs

From the inundation of the Pacific Islands, making entire communities climate refugees, to farmers’ suicides in India, due to drought and agricultural loss, we are reminded that sin has tarnished our relationship with our planet and is impacting the most vulnerable in society. It’s easy for many of us to disengage when hearing about the sheer magnitude of the problem, or even dismiss climate change in view of the Biblical view of the new earth and new heaven.

However, in the Bible Jesus tells us the most important commandments are to love God and to love our neighbors. Addressing climate change is vital to both – honoring God by being good stewards of his creation and loving our global neighbors who are hit first and worst by the climate crisis.

Our Overall View

Often Recommended

We think many of our readers should consider working on and/or donating to this issue.

What is our recommendation based on?

Biblical themes:

As the Christian charity ARocha points out, there are four main principles for why Christians should care about climate change:

  • Love: Creation reveals the beauty of its Creator. In Genesis 1, the Lord made the heavens, seas, fields, and forests who worship Him (Psalm 96: 11-13; Psalms 40).

  • Obedience: Christians are called to obey God in every part of their lives. In the Bible, God asks that men and women take responsibility for creation (Genesis 1; Leviticus 25:2; Exodus 23:10-11).

  •  Hope: We are in in-between times. Today, we groan alongside all of creation, and alongside the Spirit, as we await the restoration of our planet (Romans 8). Yet, despite this climate grief, we do not despair, as Psalm 96:13 assures us, “He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness”. The Lord is a just God, and his eternal vision encompasses environmental justice.

  • Justice:  God wants all people to be actively involved in this great plan to redeem the whole of creation. Colossians 1:19–20 says this: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. The Lord is a just God, and his eternal vision encompasses environmental justice.

Christian tradition:

  • Christianity has long experienced the call to wonder at, value and protect God’s creation. From William Carey, who is known as the father of horticulture in India, to John Wesley, who was an animal rights advocate and vegetarian, Christians have led the environmental movement for centuries.

  • In other spheres of work, prominent evangelical Christian scientists such as Sir John Houghton, ex-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of the Nobel Prize, and Katherine Hayhoe, an American climate scientist and environmental activist, all understand their work to protect the planet as part of their worship to God.

Strong secular evidence:

Top Ways To Make An Impact

Our mission as God’s ambassadors is to see His kingdom come here on earth, right now. So how will you respond today?

What Does An Impactful Career In Climate Look Like?

Steven Zhang developed strong skills in programming and software development before becoming an entrepreneur. His technical skills and interest in tackling climate change led him to build ClimateTech List, one of the most comprehensive climate tech jobs sites. Check out his full career journey here.

Part I: Should I work on climate change?

1. Is climate change the top priority?

God calls us not only to stop oppressing others but to go out of our way and love our global neighbor. How can we best live out such love in a world marred by sin, snarl and suffering? 

It would be beautiful if we could focus on all the problems of this world. But since every minute of our life can only be used once and since every dollar in our wallet can only be spent once, we can’t avoid prioritizing. The question is only whether we do it deliberately and wisely, or not. 

Climate action would seem like a top priority for living out our love. The World Economic Forum presents climate change as one of the top risks and thousands of young people consider climate change the most important issue facing the world. But are they right? 

The ITN framework helps us to make headway with such difficult questions by prioritizing challenges that are large in scale (“Importance”), solvable (“Tractability”), and not crowded by too many others working on it (“Neglectedness”).

These criteria clearly rank climate change 1 higher than most other problems in our news. Its effects are almost uniquely global, long-term, and serious – not only in worst-case scenarios but even in the most likely scenarios.

But is it the very top priority? In order to assess this, we suggest looking at two contenders for the top spot – and then to check whether there is any reason to believe that climate change scores significantly better or worse than these benchmarks. The two contenders are, first, GHD (global health and development) and human extinction. 

Of course, climate change, GHD and extinction are deeply interwoven:

  1. Climate → GHD.
    Climate mitigation eradicates poverty in three ways. First, directly – since climate change’s core impact is harming development. Second, the most important mitigation measure – making clean energy affordable – simultaneously tackles a crucial bottleneck for poverty eradication, viz. access to energy for people in poverty. Third, burning fossil fuels not only harms health via climate change but also via air pollution. Air pollution is strongly underestimated. According to the United Nations Environment Programme “air pollution is the greatest environmental threat to public health globally and accounts for an estimated 7 million premature deaths every year.” The air pollution effects of fossil fuels are more short-term and local, thus making it politically more tractable than the climate effects. 

  2. GHD → Climate.
    Eradicating poverty is one of the best measures for adapting to climate change.

  3. Climate → Extinction.
    Climate change contributes to extinction risks in various ways, e.g. via geopolitical tensions due to food insecurity or migration pressure. 

The precise question is thus whether we can best avoid suffering, rights violations and deaths by reducing emissions, by direct poverty eradication measures, or by tackling extinction risks if we take indirect effects into account in each case.

(a) Importance

The scale of the problem is global, with millions of lives in the balance.

The first criterion is importance: how many people are affected by climate change, GHD and extinction? And how seriously? 

GHD. Currently about 700 million people live in extreme poverty. Climate change might push around 30-130 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. Depending on the scenario, climate change could thus increase extreme poverty by 5-45%. If the coming decades come with falling poverty and worsening climate change, then climate change might start to account for a gradually larger share of poverty. But still, it seems like poverty that would exist even independently from climate change is of a similar, or possibly even larger scale, than climate-induced poverty. 

Extinction risks. Climate change will most likely bring about widespread suffering and death. But it is surprisingly hard to imagine climate change literally wiping out the very last human. There is a higher probability of full extinction due to an engineered pandemic, misaligned AI, or nuclear war even if all these extinction risks are less worrisome than climate change in their most likely scenario. 

Extinction (due to other factors than climate change) might have a probability of around 1-6% in the 21st century. Given a global population of 8000 million, this is about 300 million deaths in expectation. How many people will climate change kill (excluding extinction scenarios)? It is extremely hard to come up with plausible ranges (see here for attempts). A reasonable guesstimate might be 100 million. Thus, extinction risks are a somewhat larger – but not too dissimilar – problem than climate change. Extinction risks, of course, come with the additional aspect of preventing further humans from being born – a tricky aspect to evaluate from a Christian perspective.

(b) Tractability

Avoiding the worst of climate change outcomes depends on our response.

GHD. There is much dynamism in climate action. Many solutions are just waiting in the pipeline. Tractability is thus high in the near future. This is similar to GHD with its many low-hanging fruit. However, once global emissions have been cut substantially, it will be much harder to bring the remainder to net zero.2 This, too, is similar to poverty. However: while it is at least imaginable that it might be possible to solve climate change through technical solutions almost all the way down, this is much harder for GHD. For poverty, intractable institutional and cultural factors remain key bottlenecks.

Extinction risks. Extinction risks provide us with a much vaguer and more complex challenge. Even if the low public attention for extinction risks allows for some low-hanging fruit, they ultimately have much less straightforward solutions than climate change.

(c) Neglectedness

Climate change is not as neglected as most other CFI problem areas. 

GHD. Climate change often feels abstract. My morning shower adds invisible gasses which will (i) slightly increase the harm to (ii) innumerable people (iii) on the other side of the globe (iv) after decades (v) through complex atmospheric processes. This complex feel makes it neglected compared to more tangible, local, and short-term problems. However, in recent years a big movement of activists, philanthropists, and established policymakers have started galvanizing around the problem. Founders Pledge said that “Every year, over $1 trillion of social spending and $10 billion in philanthropic donations is spent on it” (see also here). Any precise comparison to GHD is extremely difficult but looking just at Official Development Assistance and the largest philanthropic foundations, it doesn’t seem that spending on the two cause areas is on a different order of magnitude. 

Extinction risks. Global catastrophic risks receive orders of magnitude less philanthropic money than climate change. Nuclear war, for example, receives below $100 million, over a hundred times less than climate change. 

However, we could in principle turn the tables on the neglectedness criterion. A number of challenges in the pipeline are structurally similar to climate change: global, long-term, and potentially catastrophic risks such as biodiversity, pandemics, AI, or anti-microbial resistance. Climate can be framed as the first of these challenges that humanity chooses to jointly tackle with seriousness. The way it tackles it – eg in terms of 

  • technology vs mindset change

  • global cooperation vs unilateral action

  • relying on expert technocracy vs fostering scientific understanding of the broad public

has repercussions for humanity’s approach to other global challenges. Climate change is thus a ‘learning mechanism’ or ‘test run’. And precisely because there is currently much focus on climate – i.e. precisely because it is less neglected – , there is leverage in channeling this big focus towards effective solutions.

(d) Upshot

What’s the upshot regarding the overall priority of climate change: is it in the same ballpark as GHD and extinction risks or not? 

GHD: Climate seems hardly a much higher or much lower priority than GHD. Possibly, it scores a bit higher in terms of tractability and a bit lower in scale, but it’s difficult to make out massive differences. 

Note that we could rely on an alternative to the ITN framework: directly comparing the benefits of an extra dollar invested into climate vs GHD. For example, GHD offers the benchmark of saving a life for around $3000. If around 4,000 tons of CO2 cause one additional death, then mitigation would have to cost less than $1 per ton of CO2 to beat GHD. It might be possible to achieve such cheap emission reductions but most estimates are higher (on an offsetting website, you’d typically pay much more). There are more sophisticated, though still extremely speculative exercises along these lines, see e.g. here, here or here. There is huge uncertainty about these numbers but this alternative approach does not strengthen the case for prioritizing climate above GHD. 

Results for extinction risks are a bit clearer but it’s still hard to see a knock-down argument in either direction. Extinction risks probably score higher on importance, clearly score lower on tractability and clearly score significantly higher on neglectedness. Extinction risks might thus be an even higher priority than climate. 

However we look at it, climate change doesn’t beat every other concern but appears as a priority area near the very top. It is one we recommend to many of our readers.

2. But what about…?

Climate change has strangely turned into a polarized issue. Hence, we list some reasons against working on climate change which are sometimes brought up but which stand on shaky grounds.

(a) “Climate action is for secular tree-huggers rather than Christians” 

God's creation is not just a cause for secular environmentalists.

Christians sometimes worry about secular people elevating nature to a role beyond a resource for humans. However, the Bible partly takes side with the tree-huggers here. While nature isn’t to be worshiped itself, it is supposed to glorify God and reveal him (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20; Job 38-41). In the process of creation, God repeatedly describes his creation as good, even before humans come around. And when he finally created humans, the point of doing so was to put us in charge of his creation (Genesis 1:26-28)

Note, however, that the case for climate action hardly hinges on the status of nature anyway. This is so for two reasons. First, even if nature has intrinsic value, it might still be fine to change nature. Especially given the fallen state of nature (Romans 8:18-23), an evolved and transformed nature can still glorify God. The nature-centric case for climate action is weaker if greenhouse gasses merely change nature without degrading it. 3

Second, even if Christians debate the moral status of nature, they don’t debate the moral status of humans. And humans are harmed by climate change. Even if protecting nature for its own sake is a reason for climate action, the biggest reason remains protecting our global neighbor via protecting nature. Climate action is part of the call to love our neighbor – the second half of the commandment on which everything else hangs (Matthew 22:37-40). Time and again God calls on us to show compassion for those in need, and to stand up against injustice (Proverbs 14:31; Luke 16:19-31). Climate change is one of the largest-scale injustices to occur in human history: those who contributed the least suffer the most, and vice versa.

(b) “The problem only seems big due to media hype” 

Climate-skeptical headlines from contrarians distract from the scientific consensus.

Contrarians sometimes harbor the suspicion that climate change only seems big due to the media fanning the flames of apocalyptic fears. However, the opposite seems true. For example, while the peer-reviewed scientific literature exhibits a greater than 99% consensus on humans causing climate change, voices which oppose stronger climate action – which are often financially well-supported – have for a long time received out-of-proportion media attention. 

(c) “We shouldn’t play God”

Addressing climate change and helping your global neighbor doesn't mean you are "playing God." 

Is it arrogant hubris if humans try to manage complex systems like the atmosphere through technical expertise and global policy making? Shouldn’t we espouse the humility of Psalm 131:1: “My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me”? There are two replies to this worry. 

The first grants that the worry about humanity overestimating its abilities and remit is appropriate – but notes that climate is not the most fitting application for this worry. After all, there are simple and straightforward steps to take our global neighbor out of climate harm’s way. These do not require controlling the atmosphere with a grand master plan. Rather, they show reverence for the creator’s sovereignty and reduce – rather than increase – humanity’s interference with complex natural systems.

A second response questions whether the worry is appropriate in the first place. While we shouldn’t “play God” in a literal sense, God did in fact give us a role similar to his own. He mandated us to rule over creation (Genesis 1:26-28). Also, the wording in Genesis doesn’t suggest a passive hands-off approach of merely conserving the status quo. We’re gardeners, not park rangers.

(d) “The world will end soon anyway”

Given near-term effects, climate mitigation is less about postponing apocalypse and more about helping people alive today.

Why care for the distant future if the world ends soon anyway? First, climate change is here now – it is not only about the far future. Second, we do not know the day and the hour (Matthew 25:13). Third, some might specifically worry that if God wants to use climate catastrophe for ending the world, it is not for us to prevent this. One problem with this kind of worry is that climate catastrophe will likely bring about suffering and death on a large scale (which we are called to prevent) but hardly the literal end of the world.

(e) “It’s overwhelming to work on a problem we can’t solve anyway”

Isn’t it pointless – or at least dispiriting – to try to stem the tide on a problem as massive as climate change? In order to face this concern we need to combine climate action with climate hope. Hope is an area of specialization of Christians. It’s not a side issue or a mere sugar coating at the end of speeches. Hope truly matters. It might well be more conducive to climate action than fear. It also makes for more cheerful climate action. And it is justified: hope doesn’t require that a solution is probable,4 it only requires that it is possible. This is clearly the case for climate change, particularly if we forego all-or-nothing-thinking. Regardless of whether we can completely solve the problem, there are big steps forward we can take, some of them with little effort.

Part II: How can I best protect my neighbors from climate change?

Good intentions don’t always translate into good results – and few areas illustrate this better than climate action. Climate victims might well benefit more from one Christian assessing more carefully which actions come with the biggest “bang for the buck” rather than ten Christians doubling their efforts. But what achieves the most for climate victims? In order to make progress on this question, we need a theory of change.

3. What, if anything, could possibly lead to a climate solution?

Some environmental burdens must merely be reduced. This is the case for plastic, light pollution or food waste. Other burdens must be eliminated. Climate belongs to the latter category: net greenhouse gas emissions must go all the way to zero over the coming decades.

(a) The challenge

If net emissions must go down to zero, we can’t simply do twice as much of whatever we’d do to cut them by half. There are three classes of emissions that make net zero more than twice as challenging as cutting emissions by half. Speaking in an overly stylized way, these are:

  1. The emissions of the poor (“subsistence emissions”): under current conditions it would be harsh to forego any steps out of poverty which come with extra emissions.

  2. The emissions of the indifferent (“careless emissions”): many don’t care much about climate change – for such trivial reasons as selfishness or exposure to misinformation.

  3. The emissions of all of us after we’ve slashed emissions by half (“stubborn emissions”): with a bit of wealth and good will we can all halve our emissions. But the second half of the path to net zero is hard even for the rich and the well-intentioned. How to live a normal life without infrastructure made of steel and cement? How to attend important events abroad – say, climate negotiations or a brother’s wedding – without air travel? How to eliminate agricultural emissions without cultural upheaval in our eating habits?

Figure 1: Overly stylized illustration of the uneven attention paid to different classes of emission reductions

(b) The solution: clean technology

The only way to cut emissions 100% is drastic improvement across clean energy technologies.

Any individual, church or nation with some wealth and good will should look beyond their own emissions, and beyond cutting them in half. This part of the task already receives a lot of attention. But if we want to stop climate change, the focus should be on all emissions and on reducing them to net zero. This means focusing on the three challenging classes of emissions. 

For reducing our own emissions by 50%, willpower might be sufficient. But for cutting all emissions by 100%, it is not. This will only happen if clean technology is cheaper than dirty technology. Clean technology doesn’t become cheap by itself. Those of us with time, money, education, and power must make it happen. If we use our resources for making clean technology cheap, we can go beyond halving our own emissions and instead play our role in eliminating 

  • the emissions of the poor

  • the emissions of the indifferent

  • our own emissions after we’ve cut them by half 

Some clean technologies receive a lot of attention while others are neglected. We can have a big impact if we focus on the blind spots of the mainstream climate response (such as steel, hot rock geothermal, carbon removal, or shipping). Another impactful focus is on technologies that prevent “locked-in” emissions, for example in the construction of long-living infrastructure (such as power plants in fast-growing emerging economies). This multiplies our impact over decades. A further impactful focus – call it “insurance thinking” – requires some explanation. Imagine two scenarios, an optimistic one with quick emission reductions and a pessimistic one with continued high emissions. In the latter, an extra ton of emissions causes more damage than in the former. This is due to the non-linear nature of climate change: twice as many emissions cause more than twice as much damage. This speaks for investing into technologies that help with reducing emissions in case the pessimistic scenario materializes.5

Creating clean alternatives for current sources of greenhouse gasses doesn’t necessarily translate into doing R&D yourself, or donating for research. Innovation typically happens when governments make it happen. Hence, promoting clean technology is much about influencing policy in the right direction. All of us can contribute to this. 

There is something distinctively Christian about (1) focusing on the three classes of emissions and (2) about making clean technology cheap in order to bring them to zero:

  • Many Christians start their Sunday service not only by confessing what they have done, but also what they have left undone. While it is a sin to harm our neighbor by actively emitting greenhouse gasses ourselves, it is just as much a sin to passively omit protecting our neighbor by failing to contribute to reducing the emissions of others. We can help to reduce the emissions of others by offering them affordable clean technology.

  • Climate change is a collective action problem. If some individuals and nations don’t contribute their fair share, others should step in – even if this means going above and beyond the call of duty. As followers of Jesus, we are OK with doing more than our fair share. God did more for us than we ever deserved, and so we, too, should not anxiously fixate on fairness – but rather on compassion for those who are vulnerable to climate change, even if it is caused by the emissions of others. 

  • Christians have a realistic view of human nature. While humans sometimes do show wonderful ambition in reducing their personal emissions, we take it for granted that good intentions only take us so far. Investing into clean technology is one of the only solutions to rely on the unilateral action of a few – instead of requiring everyone to instantly turn into moral saints and join global cooperation.

(c) Objections

Here are three objections to our proposed theory of change, i.e. that our key contribution consists in making clean technology cheap in order to tackle the three challenging classes of emissions. 

1. “Don’t we have the technology already?”

Clean technology has seen eye-popping progress in recent years. But some solutions are still too expensive (or don’t even exist). Progress doesn’t just fall from heaven – invention, development, diffusion and cost-reductions all require dedicated pushes (note for example the story behind solar’s success as described here). Examples of areas where progress would be highly beneficial include agriculture, concrete, steel, aviation, shipping, energy storage, carbon capture and storage, advanced nuclear, carbon dioxide removal, and enhanced geothermal systems.

Clean technology has seen eye-popping progress in recent years

2. Don’t we need system change rather than techno-fixes?

Yes, in principle we would need this. However, calls for system change are often very vague, sometimes rather resembling a scape-goating mechanism (“the evil system is responsible – I can’t do anything”). When they are spelled out in terms of concrete proposals, they often face two challenges. First, are they compatible with a realistic view of humans as flawed creatures? Some of the change we need can only be expected from God. Second, do proposals require such thorough change that they not only come with great potential for good outcomes but also with great potential for unforeseen negative side-effects?

3. Don’t we need degrowth?

Christians should be very skeptical of materialism and the greed for ever more. At the same time, degrowth comes with little potential as a sustainability solution. For people in poverty, economic growth is linked very strongly to poverty eradication. Poverty eradication in turn is a powerful means for protecting basic needs against climate risks. Also, there is little hope of convincing people in rich countries to forego so much growth that it would make a sizeable dent in emissions; and if it actually did, it might simultaneously stifle clean technology progress.

(d) A further consideration: two strings for one bow

How we tackle climate change affects how we tackle other upcoming global catastrophic risks. We can increase our impact by tailoring climate action so as to maximize these ‘side benefits’. Here are some examples of gearing climate action towards benefits beyond climate change:

  • Strengthening general public scientific literacy rather than merely climate literacy

  • Strengthening global collaborative institutions rather than muddling through with climate-specific ad hoc treaties

  • Normalizing policy leadership by our own nation rather than an ethos of acting only in lock-step with other nations

  • Strengthening all-purpose resilience through poverty eradication rather than merely climate-specific adaptation

  • Strengthening a selective attitude to technological progress that is neither bluntly technophobic nor bluntly techno-optimist

4. What are my options for taking climate action

So, there should be much more action on the three hard classes of emissions. But what does “there should be” mean for me personally? Collective action needs to be broken down to steps that individuals like you and I can take in the here and now. 

Four steps can be taken by all of us, regardless of whether we invest any time into climate action: prayer, donating, voting, and lifestyle. Three further steps are for those of us who are willing to invest their time – whether their spare time or their working lives: earning to give, research & development, and advocacy.

Figure 2: Actions for protecting our neighbors from climate harm (green: for all of us; yellow: for the dedicated)

(a) Lifestyle

Some lifestyle changes have a perceptible effect, especially if we prioritize lifestyle changes in areas where both policy and technology currently fail. Flying and consuming animal products fit the bill, for example. Lifestyle changes also come with signaling value: they communicate how seriously we take climate change. 

However, it’s important to be realistic about impact. Lifestyle changes are often given too much attention because they feel like a tangible and sacrificial response to an overwhelming problem. But they only reduce our own emissions. The annual emissions of many readers are around 5-10 tons. This is the amount affected by lifestyle changes. Hundreds of times as much can be affected through other solutions! Would anyone who cares about protecting crime victims would put the primary focus on eliminating their own criminal activity? If there is even a slight chance of lifestyle changes “using up” our energy and attention, we suggest to relax brazenly – and instead be radically sacrificial when it comes to impactful contributions towards eliminating the three challenging classes of emissions.

(b) Prayer

We suggest much emphasis on prayer. This includes intercession for climate victims and for our strength to act as well as repentance, thanksgiving, and letting our minds be transformed. We absolutely need God’s help because the human brain isn’t made for a problem as complex as this and human institutions aren’t made for a problem as global and long-term as this. It also benefits our own spiritual life if the physical reality down here on Earth becomes an important part of our prayer life.

(c) Voting

An efficient and fair climate solution requires political action rather than everyone trying to voluntarily do their bit without coordination. But political action only happens if individuals actually vote for it – which is a low-effort action anyway.

(d) Donations

A Founder's Pledge report found that donating to impactful climate charities is the most impactful lifestyle choice for the climate.

In contrast to some other cause areas, climate change can count on large numbers of people with time and energy hoping to put their ideas into practice. Hence, money actually has something to work with. 

In order to find the best organizations for donations, we suggest relying on the thoughtful work of Founders Pledge. They are the most impact-focused climate philanthropy adviser. The flexibility of their fund makes donations particularly fine-tuned to current circumstances. For an alternative but similar perspective Giving Green provides valuable suggestions. A helpful FAQ on climate donations can be found here. 

We suggest not to restrict donations to Christian organizations but to donate to whatever organization most impactfully reduces the three challenging classes of emissions. However, nothing speaks against publicly citing the Christian motivation for supporting climate victims via these secular organizations. 6

(e) Earning to Give

There is a flipside to there being many young graduates interested in climate work: if you decide to work in the climate space yourself, you might possibly replace someone else rather than making a counterfactual impact. Therefore, deliberately earning money (in morally acceptable ways, of course) in order to channel this money into climate action might come with a bigger impact. This increases the number of available climate jobs rather than filling one of the limited jobs yourself. 

(f) Advocacy

We can multiply the impact of our actions by influencing the actions of others: convincing them of the importance of combating climate change or the importance of choosing effective means for doing so, and by providing inspiration for doing so. 

In particular we suggest:

  • Influencing policy. The lion’s share of a climate solution will come from political action, whether through incentives, prohibitions, research funding, or international coordination. Clean technology progress doesn’t come out of thin air. Governments – who spend two orders of magnitude more on climate change than philanthropists – have always been central in prompting and shaping innovation.
    We suggest carefully selecting 

    • where to influence policy. For the majority of readers, their own town or nation may not offer the biggest potential for impact. But important decisions in another jurisdiction may be close to a tipping point. Put your effort wherever there is the most leverage.

    • what kind of policy to advocate for: see our theory of change above. It helps to select neglected issues left out by other activists, eg non-sexy areas of R&D support such as clean cement or patent law to allow international tech transfer.

Influencing policy can be done as a climate activist. But careers in the civil service, academia or business are also helpful. 

(g) Research and development

The key solution for bringing the three hard classes of emissions to net zero is clean technology. You can contribute to making clean technologies cheaper – or discovering new ones – by doing R&D yourself, particularly in promising but currently neglected areas. This could mean working in industry, founding a start-up, or doing academic work. 

R&D is certainly not the only high-leverage career option. Further good advice on climate careers can be found on the websites of Effective Environmentalism and High Impact Engineers. 

Climate Tech List tracks a large number of job openings at high-impact climate tech companies. Filtering the 80000hours job board for climate jobs also provides a selection of high-impact job opportunities. ClimateBase offers a broad range of climate jobs.

Note also that Effective Thesis supports students who look for a thesis topic, at all levels from Bachelor to PhD. If you are writing a thesis anyway, why not choose an impactful topic?

Our choices do make a difference – for our neighbors, they can replace a restless life of escaping droughts by a flourishing life in a safe home. Whether they do so for few or for many, depends on how well we turn good intentions into good results. Our top three suggestions for doing so are: 

  • advocating – and also voting – for clean technology policies 

  • donating money for clean technology progress

  • praying

Common mistakes are using up too much of our sacrificial energy for symbolic lifestyle changes, preaching to the choir, joining whatever climate movement is randomly available on the doorstep, and entering climate work in a way that simply replaces someone of similar ability to yourself.

What is our recommendation based on?

Our core motivation for climate action is the biblical command to love our neighbor and practice justice.

Biblical Themes. We are called to love our neighbor and practice justice, in particular towards the poor. This is the core reason for climate action. We have also been given a mandate to look after creation, and we have been given the promise not to be left alone in facing big tasks.

Fellow Christians. Faithful people from all corners of Christianity have taken up the call to protect life from climate harm, for example

  • Evangelicals like Katharine Hayhoe (American climate scientist and one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in 2014), Sir John Houghton (lead editor of the first three IPCC reports), or the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, as well as many other protestants.

  • Catholics like Pope Francis (with his choice to adopt the name of creation care hero St Francis of Assisi and his many strong words on the topic), Yeb Saño (the diplomat who shed tears at international negotiations and who did a climate pilgrimage), or Bruce Friedrich (who is laser-focused on solving a key bottleneck for a climate solution: alternative proteins).

  • Orthodox Christians, not only because their theology takes the material world very seriously, but also in the person of the present spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox church, the “Green Patriarch” Bartholomew of Constantinople.

Scientific Evidence. Climate change is unique in that in the 1980s the governments of this world decided to set up the IPCC, a panel tasked with regularly summarizing scientific findings on climate change. It is exposed to enormous scrutiny and thus its reports can safely be regarded as describing a consensus position on the current state of the evidence. For solid replies to all the standard skeptical arguments about climate research, see here.

Prioritization and Theory of Change. For our views on whether – and which kind of – climate action optimally supports “the least of these”, we relied on a broad base of sources, in particular various assessments from the effective altruism movement. This includes Founders Pledge’s climate research as well as reports and interviews by Johannes Ackva, its climate lead. It also includes 80,000 hours’ climate report, Effective Environmentalism’s resources, Giving Green’s work, as well as a wide array of writers such as Hannah Ritchie, David Roberts, or Dave Bookless as well as institutions such as Operation Noah, A Rocha, or the Breakthrough Institute.

Footnotes

  1. We focus here on climate mitigation, i.e. reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. There are two further areas of climate action. First, adaptation: adjusting to climate change to the extent that we haven’t mitigated it. Second, loss and damage: paying compensation to the extent that we have neither mitigated climate change nor adapted to it. Climate victims are keen that these two further areas receive enough attention. There is a further area: solar radiation management (which is often grouped together with carbon dioxide removal – which, for our intents and purposes, is close to mitigation – under the heading of geoengineering). The idea is to keep the planet habitable despite climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space. However, this approach is so distinct that it requires a separate discussion. ↩

  2. Why “zero” and why “net”? Halting global heating requires zero emissions rather than just low emissions. However, precisely speaking what must be zero are net emissions, i.e. emissions minus removals. ↩

  3. Here, we contrast inanimate nature and humans. But what about animals? The case for protecting animals for their own sake is much clearer than for protecting inanimate nature for its own sake. God cares much about animals and this is so even if he cares even more about humans (Matthew 10:29–31). Climate change will be harmful to many animal species, especially as they cannot adapt as deliberately as humans. But harm at the species level does not straightforwardly translate into harm at the individual level since well-adapted species will grow in numbers at the expense of less well-adapted species. ↩

  4. There is a danger in promoting optimism rather than hope. Optimism takes a solution to be probable rather than merely possible – and there might be no good evidence for this. Some people promote irrational optimism based on the claim that humanity has always found a way out of every mess (which doesn’t really seem true), or that technology will do the trick by itself (which doesn’t seem true either) or that the world is already taking tons of action (which, again, doesn’t seem true). ↩

  5. For more on the points in this paragraph, see this interview with Johannes Ackva. In order to translate these ideas into concrete and up-to-date donation suggestions, see the work of Founders Pledge. ↩

  6. For those who are keen to make a difference specifically in the Christian space anyway, a good idea might be donations to Christian development charities. Freedom from poverty is extremely helpful for climate resilience. Another idea is support for the Christian climate movement, examples of which are mentioned under “Advocacy.” ↩

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